Tilting at Windmills: Don Quijote in English‪.‬

PRINTED ON THE INSIDE jacket of Edith Grossman's 2003 translation of Don Quijote is the following statement: "Unless you read Spanish, you have never read Don Quixote. For many people, the belief that a novel should be read in its original language is not controvertible. The Russian writer Dostoevsky learned Spanish just to be able to read Don Quijote. Lord Byron described his reading of the novel in Spanish as "a pleasure before which all others vanish" (Don Juan 14.98). Unfortunately, there are many readers who are unable to read the novel in its original language, and those who depend upon an English translation may read a version that is linguistically and culturally quite different from the original. In his article "Traduttori Traditori: Don Quixote in English," John Jay Allen cites the number of errors he encountered in different translations as a reason for writing the article. In addition, according to Allen, literary scholarship runs the risk of being skewed as a result of the translator's inability to capture the text's original meaning: Burton Raffel, the translator of the 1995 Norton edition of the novel, acknowledges in the Introduction the importance of recreating in English the Spanish elements of the novel: "I want this translation to sound like it's set in Spain to feel as Spanish as possible.... It's not a book that could have been written in English--or indeed in any other language. Don Quijote's magnificence is indubitably Hispanic" (xv). Eight English translations have appeared since 1949. Now that 400 years have passed since the publication of Part I of Miguel de Cervantes' masterpiece, do we have today the English translations we need to appreciate Don Quijote?